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I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doin
by thunkle 4y ago
I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We'll at least I'll get a break. I worked nights and weekends all of October.
- gaws 4y ago> I worked nights and weekends all of October. Just in October? Has this happened before?
- tasuki 4y ago> I worked nights and weekends all of October. Sorry to hear that. Why were you working nights and weekends?
- par 4y agoProbably because they were scared of losing their job and were being asked to work harder.
- memish 4y agoOr they are a self motivated high achiever.
- hanspeter 4y agoOr they have fun coding.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI have fun coding. I can't get out of work fast enough. Partly to do my own coding.
- hklgny 4y agoI have fun coding. I can't wait to dig into interesting problems and figure them out - regardless of if it's for my own coding or my employers.
- Jackpillar 4y agoThis is a case study of the futility of intra-corporate "high achieving" when you can be laid off on a whim regardless of performance.
- Pet_Ant 4y agoLayoffs can be random, but promotions rarely are. It’s not necessarily a bad play.
- rchaud 4y agoDidn't seem to make a difference here.
- pyr0hu 4y agoAh yes, jumping to conclusions without letting the parent commenter reply. Genius.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bigstripedrama 4y agoSorry you're going through this and hope you don't have too much stress. I also echo the sentiment about needing a break, I wish I got laid off today. I'm not sure I can handle the Stripe culture that emerges from this.
- baxtr 4y agoHow will it change you fear?
- UncleOxidant 4y agoI don't work at stripe, but in general after a big layoff there's still the same amount of work to be done but now you have less people to do it. It's not just the people that were laid off that are gone, but others will leave after the layoff occurs fearing more layoffs to come. Leading to even less people to do the work. It can become a downward spiral for those who are left.
- kache_ 4y agoit's fine I'm sure that most of stripe work reasonable hours
- gloryjulio 4y agoFrom what I heard from various sources, you probably meant to put a /s at the end
- midhhhthrow 4y agoAt that point you really want to quit. At least until it gets to the point where the company is trying hard to keep employees That’s when they start handling out raises again
- striper123 4y agoI also wish I got laid off today. Stripe is a good company. But the Covid boom really fucked a lot of things up. I genuinely, no exaggeration, not felt my job was safe for a single day working here for over a year, and the worst part is even after this 1000 person layoff I still don't feel safe! It does not feel safe having a job that is so intimately linked to consumer spending. The things I would have done with 14 weeks paid vacation + bonus + equity vest....
- ZachSaucier 4y agoI believe that this is the case for all employees laid off by Stripe, including myself.
- thunkle 4y agoYa'll are hyper focusing on the nights and weekends. That was my personal decision, not part of the culture.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoDue to the recent news of other tech companies making their employees work nights and weekends before laying them off, it is easy to interpret your earlier message such that Stripe did the same.
- filoleg 4y ago> recent news of other tech companies making their employees work nights and weekends Are there any companies aside from Twitter that would fall under this? Because that's the only one I've seen mentioned in the news that way, but you make it sound like there are plenty others. So I was curious if I simply missed something.
- sushid 4y agoStartups. If they do the math and the trendline doesn't seem good, they'll make their teams go through a grind before layoffs. It's not necessarily to eke out a bit of productivity, per se, but they're essentially throwing hail marys in the hope that something will happen. Of course, when it inevitably doesn't they axe a few and the rest go back to work.
- filoleg 4y agoFair, I agree. For SV startups though, "working day and night" seems to be a fairly common scenario, not specific to these past few months.
- whimsicalism 4y agoThe culture is the product of many personal decisions. If I was working nights and (especially) weekends at my current employer (another big tech company), I would be told to stop.
- TorKlingberg 4y ago> Sucks because my manager was only told this morning As a manager I find their really curious. I guess they were trying to avoid leaks. I wonder how they chose who to lay off. Most recent performance rating? Next level managers impression?
- dmurdoch 4y agoI work at a company that did layoffs recently as well, about double this size. Our managers also had no idea until day of. The entire day was spent watching co workers google calendars and slack accounts. Once they got a meeting booked with HR, their meeting titles all turned into "busy", so we would know who is getting cut and who wasn't. It was a brutal day. In our case I don't think they were picking people based on performance whatsoever. It seemed to just be about who was paid the best and who in the org structure could have their job removed and someone else take over. Really weird.
- pc86 4y agoIs it "really weird," though? Layoffs, especially when you start talking about entire teams, divisions, products, etc. is about revenue, profitability, and righting the ship (or safeguarding the ship so you don't have to right it 6 months from now). Whether Jim got "exceeds expectations" or "greatly exceeds expectations" is irrelevant when an EVP needs to trim $12M off their budget and Jim's department lost $9M last year.
- imchillyb 4y ago
- JBlue42 4y agoI feel like pc86 was just being straightforward about how those decisions are made. They can speak for themselves though. When I was part of a mass lay-off, it was big enough to trigger CA state law where they had to detail everything. You could clearly see that it was strictly based on who was paid the most (below the managerial level). >The 'righting' came because of shitty financial decisions made from top-down. The top should be fired first and foremost. The company wouldn't be in the position its in if management were doing their fucking jobs. Should but rarely, if ever, happens. Some even get a larger bonus when meeting next quarter targets or some other short-term indicator.
- mandeepj 4y ago
- ceras 4y agoLayoffs do sometimes happen this way. I was an EM at a company with layoffs where line managers were not told at all about layoffs or included in deciding who to lay off: all discussions happened at the director level and up.
- the_af 4y agoI know it's true this happens because in a recent round of layoffs, my manager not only found on the very same day, but got fired himself. During mass layoffs, your immediate manager is often not told in advance in order to stop leaks and also because he/she may be one of the people laid off. (You cannot tell only some managers and leave others out, because managers of the same level talk among themselves. The ones left out would know why).
- melony 4y agoWhat was your role?
- blobbers 4y agoThis is probably good for re-normalizing behavior. The corporation is not your friend, and it can quickly turn on you. The bigger the corporation is, the less your realistic impact above replacement is. You may think you can climb the pyramid but it is very difficult to do so in a meaningful way at the mega corps. If you want to work nights and weekends, do it for yourself or a small company where you can make a difference in outcomes.
- Tade0 4y agoThis appears to be a trend. A while ago my project owner's role went "poof" and he was notified of this via email the same morning. The weird bit is that company policy is to award a generous notice period during which... you're not allowed to do anything. It's been half a year now - most of the benefits of that period(like salary) are gone. He still appears to have access to the office, but nothing to do there. I don't understand how a company which has such a program for laid off people doesn't bother to notify them in advance.
- jcadam 4y agoThey will always tell you your job is secure up until the day you're let go.
- andy_ppp 4y agoThat’s actually never how it worked at Yahoo! there was a tonne of notice that redundancies were happening and further to that more notice once your job was marked at risk. Seems particularly brutal that there doesn’t seem to be a clear process or reasoning - presumably some metric in GitHub that removes all context about what the employee was doing…
- grammers 4y agoBest of luck to you, that's tough. It shouldn't be the case that people can be laid off just like that - particularly if their work was obviously needed.
- rockostrich 4y agoSorry to hear that. My company went through a similar deep cut in May 2020 and I also wasn't informed which of my direct reports were getting laid off. After I was informed, I fought for the new hire who joined a couple of weeks earlier who was let go over one of the underperforming engineers (who has since improved a lot after getting feedback and working with me on their issues). The new hire was already contributing more and it was clear they picked up on both technical and non-technical concepts very quickly.
- orsenthil 4y ago> Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doing Usually, these 14% lay off happens to get rid off weaker folks. It is data driven.
- another_devy 4y agoYou would think that! When firing 14% staff like more than 1000 and decisions are made by handful of people it’s not about who performed better or worse it’s about firing whom will have more impact on reducing spendings and less disruption in software delivery.
- orsenthil 4y agoI know few highly paid engineers survived twitter lay offs. They were very good in their domain, and have been working for more than 10 years at twitter. Cost of keeping talented high performing, highly paid engineers is lesser than letting go low performing engineers.
- neoplatonian 4y agoHey thunkle. Sounds like a tough spot to be in, but as you said, there's always a bright side, and who knows what lies ahead. What would be a good way to contact you?
- refurb 4y agoSorry to hear that. No matter what it's always tough. But I'll share that I've been on the other side - months and months of talk of layoffs, then 6 months later announcement that layoffs will be rolled out over 3 months. Then finally hearing almost a year after rumors started. I'll say getting it over with has a certain appeal.